One of the more interesting notions to come out of the field of positive psychology is the idea of “flow.” A term in workplace psychology, flow has been described as the “secret to happiness” and is far more important than money in driving motivation at work.

Flow is, in a nutshell, what some might describe as “clicking” or “hitting your stride” or “firing on all cylinders.” It’s likely you’ve experienced it—if not at work, then perhaps while playing a sport or involved in something creative.

To be a bit more scientific, psychologists define flow as that feeling you have when you are exhilarated, euphoric, and have a deep sense of enjoyment. It is an optimal or peak experience characterized by a positive mood, and requires feelings of learning, development, and mastery of your work. It happens when we are working on tasks that push us past our own comfort zone—on both challenge and skill requirements—and it requires a clear goal and immediate feedback on the task’s success or progress.

Csikszentmihalyi has written several books on the subject, and gives an overview of the topic in the informative TED talk I linked earlier. In the workplace, Csikszentmihalyi has described a flow state as including “a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand in a goal directed, rule bound action system that provides clear clues as to how one is performing.”

This comes down to the interplay between challenge and skill. When both are higher than your average, you can obtain flow:

Alert focus, Csikszentmihalyi says, coupled with mastery, is often the staging point for entering a state of flow. He describes five ways that we can cultivate our own flow:

Set goals that have clear and immediate feedback

Become immersed and focused on a particular activity

Pay attention to what is happening in the moment

Learn to enjoy immediate experience

Proportion your skills to the challenge at hand

In his book Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning, Csikszentmihalyi also offers advice to leaders on how to help employees and teams attain flow in their work. Success, he says, has traditionally come from a combination of “two very different prerequisites: a reasonable level of resources and the technology to use them, leading to a material surplus; and a defined set of goals that helped their citizens overcome the inevitable obstacles and tragedies inherent in living. If either of these conditions is absent, life devolves to a selfish scramble; if both are lacking, it becomes utterly hopeless.”

“We need a certain amount of stability in our lives,” adds Csikszentmihalyi. “But it is not enough simply to know that the sun is going to rise the next morning, and that the robins will return in the spring. We also have to feel that despite chaos and entropy, there is some order and permanence in our relationships and that our lives are not wasted, and will leave some trace in the sands of time. In short, we must have the conviction that our existence serves a useful purpose and has value.”

For us as HR and business leaders , this is a call to action to create a workplace in which flow can—well… flow! How? Based on the research above, try starting with the following:

Set clear, challenging and attainable goals for your workers and organization.

Create meaning and purpose in your workplace with a well understood mission and values that everyone in the company believes in.

Provide stability by creating a workplace designed for sustainability and by offering employees opportunities for development and growth.

Offer ongoing feedback and recognition to ensure employees have a sense of achievement and accomplishment.

As content analyst and blogger for Globoforce, Darcy Jacobsen spends most of her days submerged in reports, tweets, research articles and other delicious information about the current state of employee recognition and engagement. Her goal is to find the good stuff and pass as much of it as possible on to you!
Darcy has a BS and an MA in history from Boston University.

10 Responses to Happiness, Flow, and How to Be a Better Leader

I like this article, and it certainly resonates with me. One point that seems to be integral for flow to develop is that the challenge or goal needs to be in an area of high interest to the employee, using and developing preferred knowledge and skill. If it’s a challenging goal but uses and develops knowledge and skills not of interest to the employee, flow won’t be enabled.

Thanks, Rosanna! I think you’re right. The goal has to be one that resonates for the employee and aligns with their own sense of achievement. It isn’t enough to set goals as an organization and hope employees find them inspiring. I think the best flow comes from setting goals that arise naturally from the culture your employees (and you) have created together. These might be program goals, mission goals or even financial business goals that are an achievable stretch and involve everyone in the organization–the sort of thing Jim Collins and Jerry Porras called a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”(BHAG).

I do consider all the ideas you’ve presented on your post. They’re really convincing and can certainly work. Still, the posts are very brief for novices. May just you please extend them a little from next time? Thanks for the post.

Hi! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading this post
reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this.
I will forward this post to him. Fairly certain he will have a
good read. Many thanks for sharing!

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